City of Fallen Souls: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 3) by Jez Cajiao (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

SLAVERS are to be given the Death Penalty,” I growled. I felt my feet lift from the cobbles. As I floated, an unearthly blue nimbus shone from me. I heard gasps rise around me, and people started to try to run, frantically shoving each other aside.

“All slaves in the Empire are FREE,” I roared, as Oracle arose from hiding, hovering next to me. Her head thrown back in an ecstasy of power, she began glowing like a tiny sun as a second burst of power emanated from me. A wave of magic rippled out, a glowing ring made of light, life, and fury, cracking lightning and hot thunder, the feeling of the pressure of the Storm combined with the life-giving rains. It passed through bodies, walls and gear. It sank into the floor and rose into the air, and before it dissipated, every slave it touched, almost a hundred meters out from me, screamed in joy at feeling their bonds break. Collars crumbled, and keys exploded in pockets, controlling devices killing dozens of slave owners and adding to the pandemonium.

“I AM JAX!” I roared into the air, my voice carrying Fury, Joy, and Triumph in equal measure.

“I AM YOUR LORD!” I repeated, the air shaking with my radiated Power.

“I FIND YOU WANTING!” I screamed, and the cobbles around me rippled, flowing outwards as if a creature beneath them had awoken. The roiling earth threw people aside, hurling them through windows and into walls and overturned carts. The blast made walls crumble and statues fall, and terrible screams rose into the air, but the slaves stood on firm ground. My people didn’t feel so much as a shudder, as this strange power stilled the earth they stood upon.

“Jax!” Lydia shouted, and I spun violently, my fury in full flow. I could feel Oracle slowly turning, her gaze like the tracking laser for a hellfire missile.

“We have to go!” she screamed at me, and I glared at her, feeling Amon’s fury at being interrupted as we dealt out punishment. “Please!” she called up, and I saw her.

The little girl she’d rescued. Lydia held the tiny figure in her arms, her shield strapped to her arm and covering the child as she sobbed in terror, her face buried in Lydia’s neck.

She was terrified of me.

She’d grown up in the city, a city that fed on the weak and the innocent, and she’d just lost her mother, but still, the most terrifying sight she’d seen... was me.

Her savior.

Chapter Twelve

I froze. The realization of what I was doing, what I had done, tore through me. I forcibly choked back my anger, my rage, feeling that strange power leave me as I fell to the ground. My feet slammed into the cobbles with enough force that I staggered, having been carried aloft on the wave of power flooding through me.

I swallowed hard. In the silence left behind, the faint echoes of my shouted words still sounded in the distance, until the cries and moans of pain began to fill the air.

I turned back, seeing the devastation that I’d wrought. Buildings had been torn apart, and the streets were shattered. People lay everywhere, some injured, some unconscious, and some dead.

I saw legs poking out of rubble, broken bones and torn flesh with blood seeping out… I heard cries for help, and I heard the sobbing rising in volume, but as I scanned the carnage, stunned by what I’d done, I also saw hope.

I saw men, women, and children; human, elves, and creatures I didn’t know; easily a dozen or more, clutching at their necks where skin that hadn’t seen sunlight for years was suddenly exposed. I saw scales, bent and grown around bonds, that were suddenly free, and I saw fur that had rubbed raw for years, suddenly exposed to the healing winds and gentle sunshine.

I gazed up, seeing that the clouds above me were slowly rolling back in. The sunlight, which shone down through the forcibly pushed back smog and contaminants, slowly dimmed as the smoke rose to cloud it again, but most of all, I felt HIM.

Amon was there, stronger than I’d ever known him, his mind more focused. I felt his madness, the centuries of punishment his soul had endured roiling though him and into me, his fears and the mental whips he’d used to flay his soul for his failures.

I felt them all, and I felt him reaching out, determined to take hold of the real world, to walk again, to feel the light of the sun and the cool breeze against his flesh, even if that flesh had to be taken from me first.

I felt his sadness and regret at what he believed he had to do, but I also saw what he intended. He would rain fire upon this city, and every other city of the Empire. He would scourge them all, the guilty and the innocent, to give the innocent of the future the chance at life.

He had decided that a cleansing was necessary.

He would cleanse the realm, and raise the races up again, bring them to the light… by force, if necessary. They were as children to him, and clearly, they’d proven they couldn’t be trusted to make things right.

No, they had to burn.

I shuddered as I felt his phantom claws reaching out. I could feel mana running through me, filling my mana channels, shifting in preparation for his call. I could feel him there, standing by my side, the feeling of his soul staring out through my eyes at the world around us, and I clamped down, hard.

I felt pain ripping through me as he fought to push through the thin barriers I erected in my mind, and I fell, shouts coming from those around me, I felt hands lifting me, and movement as I was carried, even as my mind collapsed inwards, creating a safe bastion from which to face the Eternal Emperor.

The world around me changed, and suddenly I stood alone in the